19 May 2008

Vectors in Flash Player 10

Last week Adobe released a beta version of Flash Player 10. Many exciting new features: 3D effects, a replacement for those clunky old TextField objects (finally!), improvements to the drawing API (which interestingly mirror some work I'd done for my puppet package), access to low-level audio functionality, local file access (no more stupid scripts to bounce files off a server!), etc. One of the most exciting things for me, though, is the addition of vectors.

The word "vector" has a lot of meanings, but in computer science and some branches of mathematics, it basically means "list". Of course, we already have Array objects for creating lists in ActionScript. Indeed, vectors are very similar to arrays, but with one very important difference: the elements must be of a specified type.

Note that the elements of the array are of all kinds of different types: a number, a string, a plain vanilla object, and several display objects. But suppose we changed list from an array to a vector with elements of the type DisplayObject:

Now the elements must be of a particular type, and attempting to add objects of any other type will throw an error.

Note the syntax for specifying the type of the vector's elements. This is actually an early introduction of parameterized classes, which are going to be part of the ECMAScript 4.0 standard. (They're already features of languages such as Java.) I was surprised that they'd include an ES4 feature so early, but it seems to be implemented only for vectors. I was unable to make my own parameterized classes in the alpha version of Flash CS4. Also, since Vector is a final class, you can't make subclasses, parameterized or not.

Even so, it'll be great to finally have some kind of type-safe collection. I can't tell you how many times I've had to make my own specialized, type-safe classes for this kind of thing.

Vectors will also improve performance, since the compiler can optimize code for vectors of integers, etc. When initializing a vector, you can also fix its length, allowing for further optimization. For example, to store a 3D spatial position as a list of exactly 3 numbers (x, y, and z coordinates), you can use: